Good News: You Get to Vote on Whether They Trans Your Kids!

Bad news: They're gonna do it anyway. (DN 1.17)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17

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Chapter 1: WHY

1.17 — The Democracy Problem, Part 4:
A Case Study

If we are going to move on to new forms of social organization (and that indeed is the goal here) we cannot carry the old baggage with us. We cannot cling to the belief that any hope lies inside that old musty suitcase. It doesn’t.

Come hell or high water, we must end the democracy mystique. (And yes, that includes the mystique of the American republic.)

To that end, let’s try a case study of sorts: the push in public schools to transition children without the knowledge of their parents, and to expose young children to sexual proclivities such as autogynephilia.

This is obviously a huge issue with many different aspects, all worth exploration. For our purposes, however, we can keep the focus fairly narrow.

School boards, we are told, are the democratic mechanism by which public-school officials can be held accountable for doing this sort of thing. By going to their meetings and complaining. By voting them out on election day.

Don’t want a drag queen wearing a giant phallus to parade your child around a dance floor? Don’t want them reading stories to your toddler? Don’t want councilors turning your child’s angst, or their mild and temporary gender confusion, into a lifelong mistake?

Well too bad. They’re doing it. But guess what—you get to go complain about it. It’s your right…after all, this is a democracy!

So concerned parents began going to school board meetings to do just that, and they were told the following by school board members: Your kids are going to be exposed to sexual indoctrination and encouraged to permanently mutilate themselves, and there's not jack squat you can do about it.

And then for good measure, quite a few of these parents were dragged out by police. (With a quick search, you can find videos of police hauling parents out of these meetings at the request of the school board members…unless the videos have been scrubbed, which, at current rates of revisionism, will eventually happen.)

This is the moment when the indoctrination of the democracy mystique kicks in:

But Chris—we can reform the system! We can vote the bums out.

Those still in the thrall of this mystique might even point to a few successes: Look—videos of those school board meetings have gone viral, and as a result, several school boards were flipped in the last election. We just need to do more of that.

For a spilt second, it sounds reasonable. Until you do the math.

There are more than 13,000 school districts in the United States alone, and of the minuscule number that flipped in ‘21 and ‘22, most of them have already flipped back.

Woohoo! For a couple of years, one tenth of one percent of American children were not at risk of being coerced into transitioning or twerked at by drag queens. Democracy!

Keep pushing that stone, Sisyphus. You’ll make it to the top one day.
(Oh wait—is that not how that story goes?)

It gets even worse, however, when you project your thoughts not forward in time to the possibility of winning future school board elections, but backward in time to everything that has led up to this point…

Public Schools

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Horace Mann cast his gaze admiringly upon the Prussian school system and began the process of emulating it here.¹ Unfortunately, the Prussian school system was not designed to nurture independent, critical thinkers exploring their own potential. It was designed to manufacture obedient workers and future soldiers for the Second Reich.

If you’ve gone to public school in America, you’ve seen for yourself how successfully that emulation has been. No doubt other countries have similar experiences.

Mann was at it a century and a half ago. Has anyone managed to put that toothpaste back in the tube? How’s that democracy working out for you? Some of the early presidents were still alive at that time—how’s that for the “good old days”?

Enter John Dewey and the progressive left who, a few decades later, doubled down and finished Mann’s (and Otto von Bismarck’s) project. Their goal was not the boilerplate pablum we hear in defense of public school today. Their goal was to use the education system to remake America in the statist/socialist/leftist/collectivist blueprint. Full stop.

America was just a few decades old when they began forcing this upon us. Has any amount of voting done anything to stop this train? Or has it been a one-way trip from there to drag queens twerking in front of your toddler?

Don’t like the word force? Perhaps you think that because we were able to vote on this, we “consented” to it. But did we? Did you? Can you escape it? Has anything improved? Do you see it going away any time soon?

Vouchers

Milton Friedman was talking about school choice and vouchers over a half century ago. In that time, only a smattering of locales have passed even the most modest of school-choice programs.

Look, we just passed a school-choice bill. We’re winning!

Are we? At the rate we are going, we will have gotten school choice in every district by the year 7000.² And all we will have gotten is a clunky, flawed solution to fundamentally rights-violative system.

It’s the year 7000. We finally have flying cars. We also still have a public school system designed to create soldiers to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. One that still uses a calendar from when half the population worked on farms. But hey, at least we finally got vouchers!

And what are vouchers?

Right now, you pay property tax to your local government (which claims the right to extract money from you in exchange for the ‘privilege’ of using your own property). Then they tack on school taxes, which you pay whether you have kids or not, whether you have kids in school or not, and whether you think that public schooling is a good idea or not. Refuse to pay and lose your house, serf.

Vouchers. A system in which the government—if finally forced to do so if your area after another 5,000 years of “democratic action”—will generously refund you some of that tax money to send your children to a school that you choose. So long as the government lists that school on the ‘approved’ list of schools for which you can use your voucher money.

Wow. I feel so free.

THAT is the holy grail for defeating this monstrous system? The thing that conservative and libertarian reformers have been championing since Eisenhower was president?

Failure

For decades, the cost of public education has steadily risen, yet outcomes (math, reading, science, writing, etc.) have stagnated and begun to fall off. Our children have been losing ground to the rest of the world for years.

Even if that weren’t the case, the existence of public schools would still be a violation of human rights, but the fact that it is true, especially with the insane amount of money they spend, is appalling and inexcusable.

All of this has been a one-way slide for decades. All your voting has made zero difference. Or a difference so marginal and temporary that it might as well be zero.

Schools today have become sex-reassignment indoctrination facilities. The statists, socialists, and busybodies who created the public school system may not have anticipated this exact outcome, but this outcome was nonetheless inevitable.

And this is but one of myriad ways in which public schools are not good for children. Indoctrination…tall poppy syndrome…bullying…what they did during covid—we could list them all day.

School Boards

Don’t think all that is a good environment for your kids? Don’t want men in dresses reading stories about sexual orientation to your toddler?

Great news! YOU have a say in how these schools are run.

You can vote on your local school’s budget. If you vote no, they will hold another vote and another vote until you vote yes. (They actually do this in my district.)

It’s called democracy, hater.

Not enough democracy for you? Okay, well they’ve also given us—oh, and you’re gonna love this…wait for it…

SCHOOL BOARDS!

You can run for school board. You can vote for school board members. You can go to meetings. Show me what democracy looks like… THIS is what democracy looks like.

Yeah, except here is how it has worked out in practice:

Leftist ideologues have taken over school boards. Leftists are, by definition, more interested in activism and change; conservatives are more interested in just getting on with life. Thus, leftists are always going to be drawn into fields that give them power.

Leftists run the schools.

Parents are busy. Parents don’t know the true nature of the people for whom they’re voting, or the details of what is really going on in the schools. They’re not there, and their kids cannot always provide accurate accounts. Parents don’t want to have to show up at school board meetings. (And why should they have to?)

And then, when what has been going on for decades (and ramping up to fever pitch in recent years) finally comes to light and they start showing up to school board meetings, they are dragged out by police and investigated as domestic terrorists by the government.

THAT is what democracy looks like.

You should not have to do any of this.

We have all been steeped, like a soggy bag of tea, in two centuries of reverence for democracy and inured by five millennia of submission to the involuntary state. Critiquing either as a fundamentally immoral is met with horror or derision. When the dust settles from that, this is usually the best one can hope for:

Hey buddy, all we need to do is win some elections and we can fix this!

No. We. Can’t.

Elections got us here. All the vaunted procedures of democracy led us to this point. Even the well-crafted mechanisms of the American constitutional republic were unable to stop this. The system, by its own nature, not only allows itself to be gamed—it invites it.

We could call it an anomaly if it were only happening in one country, but it is happening in democracies across the globe. The democracies that are not yet dying of this cancer are primarily in Eastern Europe, and the only reason may be that they still have people living who remember the horrors of two generations under totalitarianism. As soon as those people and their memories die off, these democracies will begin their final slide too.

When people focus on the next election, they get tunnel vision. Think about all the great gains we might make! Rarely do they take a step back and look at the losses over the last two centuries. A road downhill may have the occasional flat spot or rise, but it is still ultimately headed downhill.

The public school system is on a one-way trip from Prussian conformity to coerced sex changes. The size of government is on a one-way trip. Government’s fun new toy of oppressing us based on “emergencies” they created—well, that genie is never getting put back in the bottle either. It’s all downhill, inevitably.

Every time you convince yourself that we can use a fundamentally broken system to fix a fundamentally broken system, you hold us back from evolving. Sorry to be so blunt.

But—and this is where you really need to perk up your ears—this is about more than fixing things. We do not WANT to fix anything, because…

The…system…itself…is…not…morally…permissible.

• What if I don’t want to run for school board?

• What if I don’t want to go to school-board meetings?

• What if I don’t want to have to fight with radical leftists to try to stop them from convincing my teen daughter that the solution to her angst is to chop off her breasts?

• What if I don’t want to be dragged off by police who are rather mindlessly doing the bidding of this system?

• What if I don’t want to send my kids to such schools at all?

• What if I don’t want my money forcibly taken from me to pay for all of this?

• What if I want to choose where I send my children to school with what little money I have?

WHY SHOULDN’T ALL OF THIS BE MY CHOICE?

WHY ARE WE BEING FORCED TO LIVE THIS WAY?

Why are we acting like democracy, as a system of political organization, is somehow consensual…when it so obviously is not?

Every time you utter the words, “This is a free country,” you empower our ongoing oppression. Is the oppression as bad as Mao’s China? Obviously not.

But is that really going to be your standard? Forever?

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In order to keep writing, I do need your backing, so I am asking that you choose to support my work, and the broader purposes of this book, if you can. For those who do, here is a special link with a discount.

Flickr/Jeff/Public Domain

1. As was recently pointed out to me by Demi at The Starfire Codes.

2. Note: some of the numbers used in this article (year 7000, one tenth of one percent) are poetic license, to illustrate the point. For all I know, it will take until the year 10,000 to get school vouchers in every district.